Moment of Truth
by lionesseyes13
Summary: Resurrecting Roger wasn't the first time that Thom attempted to raise the dead. When the Sweating Sickness strikes the City of the Gods, Thom dabbles in necromancy in an attempt to save a friend from death.


Author's Note: This story was written for the Fifth Day of Midwinter Challenge, which can be found and participated in at the Tamora Pierce Writing Experiment Forum if anyone is interested.

Disclaimer: If Tamora Pierce owns it, I do not. I'm just playing in her sandbox.

_Part I: The Passion_

"_They're scared of me because I'm better than they are. They'd hate me even if I went out of my way to be good to them; and I'm certainly not going to do that."_ –Thom of Trebond explaining his anti-social tendencies to his sister Alanna in _In the Hand of the Goddess_.

"I absolve you of all your sins," murmured Master Josephe, gently tracing the Sign against Evil across Thom's roommate, Silas's, forehead in oil. Vaguely and blasphemously, Thom wondered what use the Sign against Evil would be to Silas now. Evil, as far as he could see, had already come to Silas and done its work. "In the name of all the gods."

No matter how often Thom or anyone else bathed Silas, he remained coated from head to toe in enough sweat to grease all the pans in the monastery's kitchen. Any words that emerged from Silas's dry lips were rasps hacked out between coughing fits that made his entire slender frame spasm. Last week, Silas had contracted the dreaded Sweating Sickness, which had been carried to the City of the Gods by traders who had snuck out of Corus around the curfews designed to trap the deadly disease in Tortall's capital city and spare the rest of the realm.

His stomach twisting, Thom wondered if Silas had caught the Sweating Sickness from helping out the healers in the monastery's infirmary, which seemed to be the first place the inhabitants of the City of the Gods looked to when they were seriously ill or dying. If Silas had, Thom couldn't understand why he, Thom, was currently sitting on a rickety chair beside Silas's deathbed, clutching his roommate's clammy palm tightly, and sending out enough pain-numbing magic that Silas could choke out his final confession and last words in relative comfort. Should he really be risking himself for a dying man, especially when all the beds in the infirmary were filled with patients suffering from the Sweating Sickness and pallets, also loaded with people sweating buckets and coughing up lungs, had been placed upon the floor to accommodate more of the disease's victims?

He had to be here, he told himself. Silas was the closest person he had to a friend in the monastery. Every night, before they went to bed, the two of them would talk about their days, sharing anything they wanted to, whether triumph or tragedy. Silas respected Thom's right to study in silence, but he was always willing to provide assistance if Thom needed someone to explain something to him, and asking Silas for help had never felt like asking for help at all. Silas extended a constant invitation for Thom to join his legions of friends at mealtimes in the rectory, but never nagged Thom if he chose to sit alone instead. When the two of them were assigned kitchen duty, they would sit together on the counter nearest to the fire, and the head cook, who loved Silas as much as anyone else did, wouldn't crack their knuckles with a rolling pin, leaving them free to ask one another whether using their Gifts to shell peas really was an abuse of their magical powers. That was how Thom wanted to remember Silas—a smile, instead of sweat lighting his features; his skin a healthy, rosy shade, not ashen; and his almond eyes crinkled at the edges with humor rather than contorted in agony.

Of course, he thought. He shouldn't have needed to remember Silas at all. His magic should be strong enough to save Silas, because what use was his burgeoning control over his incredible Gift if he did not have the power to stop people he cared about from dying?

And why wasn't Mithros intervening to save Silas? If anyone deserved to be miraculously healed, it was Silas. Silas was always kind, forever patient, boundlessly compassionate, able to be serious when occasions merited it, capable of cracking jokes that were funny but never hurtful, and fiercely intelligent. Silas volunteered to do extra chores around the monastery and went to more services in the chapel than students, under the threat of demerits and whippings, were required to attend. Silas assisted the healers in the infirmary and helped the kitchen servants distribute food baskets to the poorest inhabitants of the City of the Gods. Silas was always happy to answer anybody's questions about lessons, and, despite all the charity work he did with a cheery grin, always had time to make a new friend or have a conversation with an old one. Thom had no idea where his roommate found the time to do all these things when studies demanded all of Thom's energy.

Perhaps, he decided sometimes when his ego was low enough to allow him to do so, Silas was simply a better person than he was. Silas was loved by all the masters, all the students, and all the servants in the monastery. He was admired, not mistrusted or hated, because of his cleverness. Silas was living proof that the words Thom always told himself—that he would be reviled and distrusted because of his power—were lies, and that, if he was good to people, they might have loved him as much as they did Silas. Thom should have detested Silas for that, but even he couldn't bring himself to feel anything but love and respect for the roommate he had been assigned when he arrived at the monastery.

Silas was everything that a follower of Mithros should have been, Thom concluded as he sat beside his only friend's deathbed, and so Mithros should have shown mercy upon him. If Mithros wasn't going to do anything on behalf of someone like Silas, then that just reinforced the lesson that doing good to others and serving the gods availed a person of nothing in the end.

However, Silas seemed to feel otherwise, for an odd peaceful film descended over his eyes after Master Josephe had pronounced his sins absolved, as if he could no longer see Thom, Master Josephe, or the infirmary.

"I believe," he whispered, his face smoothing out and becoming impossibly calm as his whole body went limper than Thom had ever seen it, even in sleep. Horrified, already sensing what would happen in the next second, Thom watched with wide eyes and a gaping jaw, as Silas's chest rose and fell for the last time. Dimly, Thom imagined that he felt the whisper of air as Silas breathed in and out and did not breathe in again.

Silas. His roommate's and only friend's name rose like a cry in his chest but his numb lips refused to release it, and so it would echo inside his head forever. Silas. On one hand, he couldn't believe that the other boy was gone. His heart couldn't accept that Silas would never again come bursting into their bedroom from a lesson, complaining good-naturedly about the crowds in the hallways. At the same time, his reeling mind wanted to break down the wall that separated the living from the dead, so that he could share just one more joke or one more smile with Silas.

"Thank you for comforting him in his last moments, Thom." Master Josephe's soft voice cut into Thom's grief and disbelief. Suggesting that he had seen Silas's final comment as a firm declaration of fact rather than as a last protection against the black void at the end of everything, as Thom had, Master Jospehe continued, "That's a spiritual mercy neither he nor Mithros will ever forget, I'm sure, but now Silas has gone on in the certain hope of a resurrection, and you and I must find solace in that, my dear boy."

"That's all very nice," spat Thom, who wasn't in the mood for solace and who was infuriated that Master Josephe—whom Thom knew had engaged in regular discussions in his office about matters academic and religious with Silas and who had been Silas's favorite teacher—could speak of Silas's death with such acceptance as though only a faithful pet had perished instead of a brilliant young man. "It might even be useful to me if it didn't contain a logical contradiction. What in the world is a certain hope, huh? To hope for something implies a degree of uncertainly, right, so something cannot possibly be a sure hope, can it?"

"Mithros promises eternal life to his followers, and Silas believed Mithros," Master Josephe answered, his gray eyes steady despite the sheen of tears in them. "That's what I meant by a certain hope. Now, you are clearly tired and distraught. I think it would be best if you returned to your room and got some sleep, son. We don't want you falling ill, too."

"I don't want to return to my room, where he used to live, and where all his belongings are still kept as though he is going to come at any moment," hissed Thom, blinded by rage and pain. "Maybe because you are old, you can just carry on with barely a teardrop in your eye for Silas. After all, he was just another student, however clever and kind, to you, so why should you waste much time mourning for him? He was more than that to me, though. He was my best and only friend here. Now, he's gone, and I don't know what I'm going to do. All I know is what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to take a nap as if nothing happened and just get over his death as if his loss is some hurdle a horse has to jump over!"

He knew he was making a fool of himself, but, for once, he didn't care. All those dying of the Sweating Sickness should have to deal with the fury and the defiance that was the only sane response to the pointlessness of death before, like Silas, they found their light swallowed up by endless blackness.

"Go wherever your soul finds rest." Master Josephe patted Thom's shoulder, and suddenly the young man recalled that Master Jospehe was his favorite instructor, because he was the only teacher who ever seemed interested in encouraging rather than merely controlling Thom's Gift. "My prayers go with you."

"Save your prayers for yourself, sir," muttered Thom, hurrying down the aisle between the beds and pallets loaded with the dying. "I have no need of them."

_Part II: The Grave_

"_How like you to see it in those terms. She is my student. You could never sustain so profound a bond. Once you gained your throne, you decided that you no longer required mere human bonds."—_Numair defending his relationship with his pupil Dain to his former friend Ozorne in _Emperor Mage._

There was only one place where Thom could imagine finding sanctuary now: the monastery library. With the dull acquiescence of his still numb mind, his feet transported him there. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the dusty smell of ancient books and scrolls; wooden study carrels and bookshelves; ink and parchment mingling together to create a pungent aroma he indelibly associated with learning.

Trying to remove Silas's face from his head, he stared around at the shelves. He always retreated here—to the coldly logical letters that contained all the answers—when he couldn't answer all the heated, emotional questions of life. Whenever he needed comfort, he could always find refuge in the brain droppings of the great minds of the past, but he couldn't picture any of the tomes even in this massive library containing even one would that would be a consolation to him now.

Yet, there had to be books about death in a monastery that was ultimately intended to prepare its occupants for the afterlife, he told himself, and, if there were volumes about death here, then there had to be at least one kernel of wisdom in this library for him to locate.

His eyes narrowed as he scanned the rows of books. There were two sections in the monastery library, he reasoned, where he would discussions of death: the theology and necromancy sections.

The theology section, far more extensive and better maintained, would house books that gave birth to the platitudes Master Josephe had spewed earlier. Those tomes would portray death not as an evil that must be fought, but as an agent of the gods that must be accepted with grace, humility, and dignity. That was the section for the Master Josephes and Silases of the world.

It was not the domain of the Thoms. Thom wouldn't accept death; he would fight it. He wasn't like his idiotic father and misguided sister. He would not fear death or his magic, because he could control his Gift and he could use his magic to master death. In order to bring death to heel, though, he would have to venture into the small, dimly lit alcove devoted to the necromancy section. That was the place for people like him who were determined to break death's oppressive hold on the world.

Taking a deep breath, since he had been taught that necromancy was the darkest magic of all and unrepentant practitioners of the art went straight to the worst portion of the afterlife upon their deaths, Thom entered the niche containing tattered scrolls and books about necromancy. Clearly, these writings had not been recopied by monks who spent months lovingly penning and illustrating copies of ancient religious texts.

As he studied the bookcase, looking for the volume that seemed most useful, he assured himself that necromancy was only painted as evil so people would trust in divine rather than human power for deliverance from death and that if anyone happened to see him here, he would claim he was researching necromancy to write an essay condemning its depravities.

Of course, he doubted he would encounter anybody in the library when everyone who wasn't busy in the infirmary, the kitchen, or in the chapel was hiding in their rooms to reduce the odds of dying from the Sweating Sickness. Now was the opportune moment to delve into forbidden magic.

Removing the thickest scroll from the highest shelf, he carried it over to a nearby carrel furnished with a candle, a quill, an inkwell, and several pieces of parchment for note-taking. With a twinge of dark humor, he remembered that a carrel was often referred to as a grave by students due to the fact that a scholar could disappear into one, reading and writing for hours, without feeling as though more than a few moments had elapsed.

Grimly deciding that it was time to begin his period in the grave, Thom unraveled the scroll. After sneezing quietly when the battered scroll emitted a cloud of dust, he lit the candle and leaned forward to read:

"_In the common mindset, death is a holy mystery and burial a sacred secret. This is why necromancy, which attempts to life the veil of secrecy surrounding deaths and burials, is stigmatized. The masses are attracted by the concept of resurrection and repelled by the reality of it. This is why religion is the balm of all classes, while necromancy is universally despised. _

"_However, the condemnation of necromancy is not an evil precisely because it means that only those of the sharpest mid and strongest will are impelled to investigate this allegedly blackest of all magical arts. As necromancy can only be successfully practiced by the clever and determined, since forays into this field by the feeble-minded or weak-willed inevitably result in catastrophe, it is, in fact, to the benefit of necromancy that the skill is so reviled by the general populace. _

"_Necromancy requires the mage to have a brilliant mind, because in order to raise the dead, the mage must be able to accurately envision the dead as the deceased was in life. An inaccurate or insubstantial image of the deceased results in a reanimated body with a vastly different personality than the deceased originally possessed. _

"_Likewise, a necromancer must have a powerful will not only to successfully drag the deceased's spirit back to its body, but also to maintain control over the reanimated body until the deceased demonstrates an ability to control the violent urges common to the reanimated. When the necromancer is weak-willed, he may be trapped in the Realms of the Dead himself or he may be killed by a violent reanimated body he cannot control."_

"Interesting," muttered Thom, his forehead furrowing, "but I'm strong-willed and intelligent. I'm sure I'll have no trouble remembering Silas or controlling him. I mean, it's not like he was violent in life."

Reassured by his own voice and logic, he continued to read:

"_For best results, necromancy should be performed as soon after death as possible. Fetid corpses draw negative attention, and rotten bodies are more challenging to dominate than fresher ones. Furthermore, the longer the spirit has been in the Realms of the Dead, the more reluctant it is to return to its body, and the harder it is to control." _

"That's also not a concern," Thom murmured, thinking that performing necromancy in a monastery was far less complicated than he could possibly have imagined. "Silas has just died, and he will be kept in the chapel with the rest of the new corpses until a new mass grave can be dug for them outside the city limits. Nobody will notice one more or less corpse, and, if they do, they'll just have to call it a miracle."

"A miracle?" Master Josephe's voice repeated from behind Thom, causing him to start in alarm. "What miracle would that be, Thom?"

"I didn't hear you coming up behind me," Thom grunted, ignoring the question because that was far easier than answering it.

"People miss much of what goes on around them when they are too invested in their studies. That's one of the reasons why their carrels are commonly referred to as graves, because its occupants can be as blind and deaf as corpses." Master Josephe sighed. "Anyway, I have noticed that you are seldom apart from books, so I thought that I might find you here to check how you are feeling."

"I'm feeling curious." Thom could almost feel the crazed burning in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder at his favorite teacher. "Drawn to the eternal mystery of how life after death works."

"Ah." Master Josephe nodded, a pensive frown marring his normally soft features. "The miracle you referred to is resurrection, in that case."

"It's the only real miracle." Thom pressed his lips together. "As long as people are subject to death, nothing they achieve is worth anything, because even the greatest accomplishments are inevitably lost to time, and the only way for people to achieve miracles is through magic."

"You're researching magical means of raising the dead." Master Josephe's voice was as sour as a lemon, and his screwed lips made him appear as if he had just swallowed one. Abruptly reaching over Thom's shoulder to snatch up the musty scroll, he snarled, "You're researching necromancy."

"I was looking at that scroll," protested Thom angrily. "I'd thank you to give it back now."

"It will blizzard in July before I return this to you." Decisively, Master Josephe snapped the scroll shut. "You shouldn't have been looking at this black magic in the first place, boy."

"That's an ancient scroll," Thom hissed, attempting to grab the scroll Master Josephe was holding just outside of his reach. "You shouldn't go snapping it shut like that. You might damage it."

"It's filth," spat Master Josephe, his trembling fingers implying that he was itching to rip the aged parchment to illegible shreds. "If it has to be read at all, it should be studied only by the most learned priests, who know how to refute its blasphemous lies."

"Please return it to me," Thom said in a quieter tone, deciding that a humbler approach might be more effective with the typically placid monk. "I just want to understand what happened to my best friend and how to proceed now that he's gone."

"A noble goal." Master Josephe pursed his lips. "Fortunately for you, we have an entire theology section devoted to explaining why we die, what happens when we die, and how the living can accept the deaths of loved ones. It's all there—mystical visions of the Realms of the Dead, emotional conversations with the gods, and prayerful, philosophical reflections on how the chaotic human experience reveals the ultimate order of divine plans. Should those books, the accumulated musings of the most devout and educated Mithrans from the past few centuries, fail to satisfy you, you'll discover all the answers you need in private prayer and spiritual discussions with the monks here. All you'll find in scrolls and books about necromancy is temptation to assuage your grief through the vilest magic."

"How can it be vile magic?" demanded Thom, his lip quivering. "I just want to learn how to bring Silas back to life. What is wrong with that when Silas was one of the few good, selfless people in the world?"

"When you just read that disgusting scroll, how can you ask me why necromancy is the blackest magic?" Master Josephe returned crisply. "Necromancy is evil because it involves digging up rotten corpses and forcing spirits to reanimate them. It is evil because the spirits who reanimate the corpses are violent, and the mage either controls the spirit or the spirit dominates and destroys the mage. It's evil because the spirits that fill the corpses are often angry, dark forces, not the spirits of the deceased, which are focused on bringing terror and conflict to our world. It's evil because when the spirits of the deceased instead of an evil spirit are actually dragged back to reanimate their bodies, the deceased's spirit is miserable and longs to return to the Realms of the Dead."

Pausing, Master Josephe took a deep, fortifying breath before continuing, "People who are dead don't wish to return to our world, Thom. They've moved onto the afterlife, and we need to accept that. We have to dedicate our energy to living productive, moral existences in which we preserve and respect as many lives as possible rather than trying to raise the dead, since even necromancy only allows people to reanimate a fetid corpse with an evil or sullen spirit. A body isn't what makes a person; a soul is, and Silas's soul is at peace in the Realms of the Dead. Don't try to disturb it, or you will regret it every day of your life."

"As if death wasn't a disturbance," snorted Thom. "His spirit will thank me for sparing it from an eternal blackness presided over cruel, indifferent deities."

"Spoken like a young fool." Master Josephe's words were stern, but the hands he rested on Thom's shoulders were gentle. "Death is the way of the universe, which is another way of saying that it is the will of the gods, and the gods can never successfully be defied. Nobody can escape death, and everything is fleeting. In time, even stars burn out. To hold onto someone or something beyond his or its time is to set your selfish desires against the gods. That is a sure path to sorrow, Thom of Trebond, upon which wise men don't tread."

Thom's heart was racing in his chest, and his head was throbbing against his skull. What Master Josephe described was the fear that had lived inside him since he discovered that his mother was dead, and, unlike even the dumb sheep of the fields, he didn't have a mother to cuddle him. It was the fear of that dead star of which Master Josephe had spoken. It was a cold, expressionless voice within his heart that whispered of the death of all things.

It was the memory of this voice that forced him to hold himself aloft from Coram, Maude, and the other students at the monastery, because they would die, and he would not want to mourn them. It was this fear that reasoned that, if he never got attached to people, he would not miss them when they died. After all, if he never interacted with others, he couldn't notice when they were gone, but he had allowed himself to care about Silas, who was now dead, and that horrible voice inside him that reminded him of the end of all things was speaking louder than ever to him.

He had come to the library to forget that dreadful voice, but Master Josephe's statement made the walls he had built to keep the terrible voice out of his mind and heart frost over and crack. Now, the dead-star fear was sneaking through the cracks, crawling into his brain and gnawing at his heart, reminding him of what he had lost and what he would lose. Showing him images of his mother, who had spent her last strength giving birth to him and Alanna. Assaulting him with pictures of Silas, who had entered the frigid, dark void of defiantly insisting that he believed in light and warmth. Pointing out that someday he would lose Alanna or she would lose him if he didn't figure out how to vanquish death.

All things died. Even stars burned out. He could barely even think about it, but right now, he didn't have a choice. The boy he must save was a closer friend than he had ever wanted to have. That was what put the edge in his voice, flattened his mouth, and tightened his jaw.

Silas had been like a brother to him: always there, always caring, always free with advice and unstinting aid. A sympathetic ear and a kindly, loving, unconditional acceptance of Thom exactly as he was—the sort of acceptance he could never have received from Coram, Maude, or any of other students at the monastery. Not even from Alanna. He could tell his roommate secrets he could never have shared with his twin.

Now, Silas was trapped in a void, and Thom would rescue him despite the dread boiling through his, Thom's, bloodstream. That was what made him a true hero—not without fear like Alanna or Coram, but stronger than fear.

If anyone could save Silas, Thom could, because Thom was already the best at magic, and he was only getting better with each passing day. He knew that, but locked away behind the walls of his heart, fear coiled and squirmed, since he couldn't help but wonder if, in a universe where even stars burned out, being the best would ever be quite good enough to save anybody.

"Don't talk to me," Thom choked out, unsure whether he was addressing the fear inside him or Master Josephe, and not convinced that it even mattered to whom he was speaking. "I want to go back to my room and mourn Silas alone."

His forehead knotting as though he found it suspicious that the boy who had not wanted to return to the room he had shared with Silas would wish to retreat there now, Master Josephe warned, "If I catch you touching anything in the necromancy section again, the punishment, I assure you, will be severe. You may not understand why I'm being so harsh with you, but teachers must guide not only the intellectual growth of their students, but also the moral and spiritual growth of their pupils, which is what I intend to do now."

Deciding that he would never again dignify anybody who kept him from his precious books or restricted the intake of the magical knowledge that was his only path to power over life and death with a response, Thom spun on his heel and marched out of the library.

_The Resurrection_

"_Mages. They save their scariest tricks for when they are trying to help folk."_—Einur explaining to Keladry of Mindelan his unfavorable opinion of mages in _Lady Knight_.

In case Master Josephe tailed him through the practically deserted monastery corridors, Thom returned to the room he had, until recently, inhabited with Silas. Upon entering the chamber and shutting the door behind him, the silence of the walls that had once echoed with the sound of his and Silas's chatter and laughter resounded in his eardrums.

Collapsing onto his bed, Thom realized that, while the room had been quiet when he and Silas had studied and slept, it had never been silent as a grave like it was now. When they had been studying, he could rely upon hearing the rustle of shifting scrolls and the scratch of a quill against parchment as Silas worked at the desk across the room, the scholarly noises a perfect counterpoint to his own thoughts. At night, he could count on Silas's steady breathing to drift him into dreams.

Silas, Thom remembered with a sudden pang in his chest, had slept with his spine rigid and his hands folded neatly across his stomach, like a corpse in a coffin, as though his body knew he would die young and was determined to prepare him to die with dignity. Thom, on the other hand, had always slept curled up in a fetal position, as if his body wanted him to recall a time when he had possessed a mother to keep him warm. Together, he thought darkly, he and Silas had shown all the stages of human lifestyle from conception to death.

It would be safe to leave his room for the chapel now, he told himself, shoving himself off his bed and striding out his door with all the confidence he could muster. Unable to wipe his mind of a hundred pictures of Silas, he wended his way down corridors and stairwells until he reached the entrance hall of the monastery. From there, his feet carried him out of the monastery, across the yard, and into the chilled, ornate chapel.

Beating down his nerves and ignoring his pounding heart, he stepped into the tiny nave decorated with gleaming golden statues of gods and goddesses, where cold, dead bodies lined the marble floor, waiting for burial in another mass grave dug for the victims of the Sweating Sickness. As he swallowed the vomit that blazed up his throat into his mouth at the sight of so many blue-lipped, forever motionless bodies, Thom scanned their faces, looking for Silas.

Within seconds, he spotted his friend and knelt beside the other boy's remains. Closing his eyes and telling himself that he couldn't smell corpses as fresh as these rotting, Thom focused on remembering Silas, sprawled across his bed, several weeks ago—before the Sweating Sickness struck the City of the Gods and upended all their lives—asking him with twinkling eyes, "Why was the master cross-eyed, Thom?" Then, when Thom couldn't figure out the answer to his riddle, bursting out a few seconds later, "Because he wanted to keep his eyes on his pupils."

Thom remembered the sound of the hearty laugh that had rippled from Silas's lips after he had shared his pun and envisioned Silas laughing again. Then, Thom imagined Silas's eyes lighting with humor and intelligence as they had when offering his quip. Finally, Thom pictured warmth and life streaming from Silas instead of coldness and death.

Drawing on the deepest reserves of his Gift, Thom sent it flowing into Silas, trying to transform his glorious visions into reality. He felt himself slipping into a dark, shadowy realm where the ground was only dust and the sun was a scorching orange with a handsome man's face burning in it.

A faint, gray glow that somehow felt exactly like Silas sidled up to him, and he whispered, hardly daring to believe necromancy was this simple, "Silas?"

"Catch me if you can then." The gray glow shot away from Thom, hovering just out of his grasp and laughing derisively.

Silas never laughed derisively at anybody, which meant that the gray glow wasn't Silas. He had to go on if he wanted to find Silas, but now the handsome man in the sun was glaring down on Thom, and- he could never have explained even to himself how he knew this—but he abruptly understood that this man had sent the Sweating Sickness and would never want Thom resurrecting anyone who died of the disease. He had to get close enough to figure out who that man in the sun was, but as he thought that, he felt himself being hurled from the shadowy land.

Shaking, Thom stared down at the corpse laden floor. The man in the sun had created all these bodies. It was nearly impossible for Thom to imagine having the magical power required to inflict an entire country with a deadly ailment. That meant that it was beyond dispute that the man in the sun, for now, was a far stronger mage than Thom was, and it would be unwise for Thom to attract the mage's attention by advertizing his power.

He would have to develop his magical powers in secret, hiding his light under a bushel, because he could bet his bottom penny that the man in the sky would have spies in the City of the Gods, looking for students with enough power to challenge him and seeking the being who had tried to pull one of the Sweating Sickness's victims back to the world of the living. Thom valued his life, and he wasn't going to risk it in order to save Silas. Silas would have to remain in the Realms of the Dead while Thom devoted all his time and energy to honing his Gift and making his own covert inquiries into the identity of the man in the sun.

Maybe it was even for the best, he told himself, as he knelt on the frigid and unfeeling marble that he wished his heart could emulate, because in the part of the Realms of the Dead where the righteous departed were sent, there were said to be no more tears. It was time for Thom, like Silas, to never shed another tear. It was time for him to become a stone. It was time for him to disappear into his rooms, studying clandestinely, valuing instead of cursing the pain that would have shattered a lesser man, and treasuring the loneliness that would have crippled anyone else.

Even though Silas was dead, he would always love the only best friend that he would ever permit himself to have. No matter how much Silas had wounded him by dying, he would still continue to love Silas even if he couldn't save the other boy. It would be wrong to try to escape that. He needed to hold onto his love for Silas and his dead mother whatever it cost him—to cling to it like a drowning sailor would to driftwood even as love for them tore his heart apart—because that was how the most powerful mages stayed strong. They needed that agony so they wouldn't forget the pain they were inflicting upon others. To make the world safer, everyone including mages like Thom and the one who had sent the Sweating Sickness had to suffer. He would understand that next time he tried to raise the dead, and he would not cry when his growing magical might cut him apart from even his twin, because he saw that lost love was the price of greatness and resurrection could only be achieved when you didn't fear losing anyone.


End file.
